Northern Light

by Roy MacGregor

  She cared for them well, he said. She was an instant success at her new job and quickly became considered all but irreplaceable at Shortreed. The manager of the mill was Jack MacNeill, who had married into the Shortreed family, and soon he was concentrating on the mill and leaving the office to her. “Winnie knew as much about the business as MacNeill did,” Pocock wrote. “She was in on many a consultation on business affairs.

  “She paid the wages and heard the complaints of all. She kept her office clean and neat. She was always treated with respect about the mill—she could put any of them in their place. She was called ‘Winnie’ for short. I know of no practical jokes played on her. She could take her part. I believe she had a way of reminding a few if they did not behave better, they would be out of a job—and nobody wanted that.”

  In Pocock’s opinion, the Winnie Trainor of middle age was anything but reclusive. She was friendly with the Pococks and many other families, including the Hurds, Grooms, Whites, Murdys and Harknesses. There were times, he said, when she would leave the office and travel with him and Jack MacNeill as they made their rounds of the winter bush camps. She carried her weight, he said, and kept up easily on the long bush walks from where the trains would drop them off.

  When Dr. Pocock eventually moved to Huntsville, he became a familiar figure around town in the 1970s and early 1980s: a small man, badly stooped, who had to walk oddly, with his back bent almost parallel to the ground. His head stuck up, birdlike, and through his mane of white hair and smiling white moustache, he nodded to everyone he passed. He studied French as a retirement hobby and hoped to translate his own memoirs, which he was continually writing. He had previously self-published a historical novel, The Three Gifts, and could not understand why it had never become a national bestseller. Its failure to find an appreciative audience had become something of an obsession with him in his retirement years, and he often wrote long letters to me, by hand, about his book troubles. In those letters, however, he also spoke of his life travelling about the lumber camps, caring for sick and injured men, delivering babies in isolated depots along the rail lines and even performing as veterinarian when necessary. He set bones, pulled teeth, sewed gashes and dealt with porcupine quills and sick workhorses.

  He knew of all the grumblings claiming there had been an expedient inquest and convenient death and burial certificates and suspicious undertakers at Canoe Lake in the summer of 1917, but he put no stock in such talk. He was a friend of Roy Dixon, the undertaker who had done the embalming, and considered him “an honourable man” who “was up in the Masons.” As for Churchill, who mysteriously chose to work alone in the dark to dig up a grave, Pocock said: “There’s nothing unusual in those times of working in the dark digging graves. I did it myself burying premature babies. At that time I worked with the undertaker myself after dark, holding the lantern. In those days they didn’t even register miscarriages. No need for an investigation. I was the coroner. When you’re the only doctor, you’re everything.”

  Dr. Pocock certainly had his strong opinions. In his mind, there was never the slightest doubt that Winnifred Trainor had been engaged to marry Tom Thomson. He told me his patient and friend “never complained to me of any pregnancies or abortions or anything” and did not even care to imagine that any such thing could have taken place. His own opinion of Thomson’s demise, which he claimed Winnie shared, was that Tom had suffered a heart attack while paddling and fallen from his canoe. Winnie herself never made any such claim, but rather believed all her life that something “foul” had happened that July day back in 1917.

  “As far as I know,” Dr. Pocock wrote in one letter, “Winnie was never romantically involved with anyone else. She loved Thomson. She thought that it was a terrible thing.” In a taped interview I did with him in 1973, he said that Winnie “did say that she didn’t think it was suicide.” He also said that there were rumours around that Martin Blecher had a grudge against Thomson for what Pocock called “inveigling the women.”

  Pocock said his family’s close friendship with Winnie was somewhat out of the ordinary in little Kearney, as while she was friendly with many, she was close to very few. “You wouldn’t say that she was popular,” he told me. “She was often outspoken and didn’t make too many friends.” At another point, he wrote: “She was always well supplied with the latest gossip and gossiped herself. She liked with a stubborn loyalty and disliked with vigor.”

  In a letter he sent to me in January, 1976, he wrote, “I should like to have you dismiss the thoughts that she was as eccentric as others would lead you to believe. She was wide awake to all that was going on and sometimes very outspoken in a way that made her some enemies. She was a kind, unselfish and deeply concerned person for the happiness of others. Gossip never troubled her, and she never ran away from it.”

  His impression of Winnie in her mid-thirties was of a striking woman, instantly noticed. “I wish I had a good photo of her,” he wrote to me on February 8th the next year, “but I do remember how she looked and how beautiful she was. Winnie was tall, well built. She wore her hair short. Her face was round and plump with brown hair straight, not curled. She had a very athletic body, a pleasant smile—well-kept teeth and spoke in a clear voice and a self-confident manner. She was not overweight—very active on her feet. She had a great mind.

  “The eccentricity is a word attached to her by folks who did not like her for her outspoken manner. Winnie impressed our family very favourably—yes, she was eccentric, but not foolishly so.”

  Pocock’s impressions of Hugh and Margaret Trainor were equally fine. “When I knew Hugh Trainor in 1919,” Pocock wrote, “he was not ill nor his wife. I often visited them because Winnie and I became close friends … It is probable that Hugh drank a little when he was camp foreman for Muskoka Wood Company and perhaps he had a time keeping his men in line and even fought … His talk was free of cursing and gutter language and in all ways he was polite and congenial. He was a man of medium height, thick set, fair and clean shaven. His wife was quiet, too, and very pleasant to talk to. Winnie took charge of her parents and there was harmony in the household.”

  He later said Winnie put on weight while in Kearney and became significantly heavier. “Plump” was the word he used. “I can remember,” he said in one letter, “when she had to use the chamber [pot] in her room in the middle of the night. Suddenly, we were aroused to find she had put her full weight on the pot which had split into fragments, spilling all over the floor. Fortunately, she was unhurt.”

  Though Dr. Pocock himself had not met Tom Thomson, he felt he had gotten to know him through her. “Winnie did not mention Tom Thompson [sic] to many,” he wrote to me in one long letter, “but she often talked to me, as her intimate friend and her doctor, and the executor of her will. I shall never forget how she cried when she was showing me the first painting sketches from which the artist painted the large finished paintings.”

  Dr. Pocock described a scene in Huntsville in which she held up one of the sketches and broke down. “We were in love,” Pocock quoted Winnie as saying, “but he said ‘How could he be my husband?’ He said ‘I have my art but no money.’ ” She shook the sketch as if it were now somehow to blame. “Now,” she said, her voice breaking, “these mean a fortune.”

  Pocock said she began to sob. “ ‘How,’ she wailed, ‘could fate be so unjust to us?’ ”

  The Trainors moved the forty kilometres north from Huntsville to Kearney in 1918, just as the Spanish flu was sweeping the world—attacking the young and healthy and leaving twice as many dead as the Great War had killed. Fortunately, the family avoided being listed in “Death’s Tragic Harvest,” a weekly feature that for a time figured more prominently than the happy “Personals” listings in the local paper. The Huntsville Forester even offered a home remedy: “6–10 onions, chop fine, put in a large spider [pan] over a hot fire, then add about same quantity of rye meal and vinegar, enough to make a thick paste. Stir 5 minutes. Put in cotton bag, big enough to cove
r lungs. Apply as hot as can bear.” Schools and churches closed. Streets were empty. People avoided social gatherings. The carefree release from war that had been anticipated for so long was sadly postponed.

  Some of the theories defied reason. A German U-boat was said to have surfaced in Boston Harbor, releasing vials of the germ. The germ was said to be imbedded in Aspirin (Bayer being a German company). A vaccine was sought utilizing the blood and mucus of those already afflicted. In Rebecca Atkins’s memoir, My Childhood in the Bush, she says Dr. Archie McMurchy of North Bay concocted a rum and quinine treatment that was, to no surprise, popular with the men working the bush around Algonquin Park.

  The flu eventually passed, and the Trainors settled into regular village life: work, church and quiet social gatherings, usually connected to the Anglican church. Canoe Lake was so much easier to reach from Kearney that they could catch a morning train in and an evening train home if they wished. Weekends in good weather were spent at the lake, as were summer holidays. Winnie often made the trek up to the cemetery, some saying she went because she knew, as so many others were convinced, that he was still there, others saying it was because she resented campers placing flowers on an empty grave. She knew it was empty, of course, because she had been the one who had arranged the exhumation of Tom Thomson, and when Winnie took on a task, she took pride in completing it.

  Kearney was much quieter than bustling, fast-growing Huntsville. It was all dirt streets and few automobiles. Travel by horse, and horse and buggy, was still common. Water came from wells. Homes had outhouses. Livestock and chickens would have been found on the outlying farms and on properties right in the village. The most prominent house in Kearney, out on a small point at a twist in the Magnetawan River, was a two-storey frame building belonging to the Bice family—Ralph Bice, being the renowned Algonquin Park guide who had known Tom Thomson and ran traplines in the area. The sale of pelts was, in fact, the park’s second major source of revenue in those days, after timber-cutting rights, with staff assigned to check traplines and rangers themselves often skinning and stretching the pelts before they were taken to North Bay for the annual fur auction. Buyers from around the world would come to bid on the best furs, and Ralph Bice’s were judged the best in the auction time and time again.

  Algonquin Park was run much differently in the early days than it is now. Ralph and his father, for instance, had been hired to shoot park deer during the later months of the Great War, and hundreds of deer had been quickly dressed and frozen and shipped off to feed troops stationed around the country. Trapping by staff members was not stopped until 1920, but when it was, ranger operations became cash strapped. The park then had to impose a hiring freeze, as headquarters could no longer afford taking on additional help. The rangers were furious to lose what had become a welcome source of income, and many workers in the park—my father included—continued to trap illegally during the Great Depression. Reduced wages and relief payments could not compare with the windfall of a well-dressed mink, marten, otter or beaver.

  There were changes around Canoe Lake, as well. In the spring of 1918, around the time Winnie and her mother were returning from Philadelphia, the two guides who had found Tom’s body, George Rowe and Lawrie Dickson, struck a deadhead when they were paddling during a storm and dumped their canoe. Molly Colson heard their cries for help and Ed Colson rescued them and brought them back to Algonquin Hotel, where George quickly recovered but Lawrie steadily worsened. He was rushed to hospital in Toronto where he died in the first week of May. Locals claim George Rowe never touched strong drink again following the tragedy.

  In November 1920 Mowat Lodge burned to the ground. Shannon Fraser was there, but Annie and their daughter were fortunately away. Shannon managed to save the livestock and chickens, but most of the furniture and most of the family’s other personal belongings were lost. The Frasers did manage to purchase a relatively new cabin that had been built by George Rowe near the old Gilmour mill site, and Shannon was then able to arrange, presumably with insurance money as a base, to put up a new Mowat Lodge. But this time the place would be built on the abandoned mill’s footings, with a better view out over Canoe Lake. The first section was completed in time for the next summer season, and a second section added later. The lodge remained popular, and the tourist trade was increasing summer by summer. By 1927 Canoe Lake again had enough permanent residents that a school was opened. The local highlight of Canada’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations of that year was a huge dance put on by the Frasers of Mowat Lodge.

  The new Mowat Lodge, however, also burned to the ground, in May of 1930. The fire took out the Rowe cabin, too, and the Frasers decided to retire from the lodge business. They lived in Kearney for several years before moving on to Huntsville, where, eventually, the widowed Annie Fraser and the spinster Winnie Trainor ending up living on the same block of Minerva Street in early 1950s.

  Winnie would have known about the increasing interest that was being shown in Tom Thomson’s work in the years following his death, but she might not have been aware of the changes taking place in the Thomson family at Owen Sound. In 1924, shortly after the estate he had been overseeing was finally settled, Tom Harkness died. Less than a year later, Margaret Thomson passed away. The family said she had never been the same after her son’s tragic death.

  John Thomson lived on, later marrying his sister-in-law Henrietta, who had lived in the Thomson household for many years. It was believed he did so in order to quell any talk there might be about Henrietta living there with a widower. He was written up in a February 4, 1926, Toronto newspaper feature that also discussed his dead son, the old man being described as having “a head that might inspire a Rembrandt … His face… [revealing] some of the secrets of his son’s art. It is a living canvas which records the healthy ruggedness of [the] Northern Ontario landscape. He is a man of the out of doors, as his son was a painter of the out of doors.” On September 1, 1930, John Thomson passed away at the age of ninety.

  Mark Robinson—often referred to as the “G’neral” following his war service—continued on as chief ranger of Algonquin Park for a few years after Thomson’s death. But he fell ill around 1924, underwent serious surgery and required more than a year to recuperate. At the end of 1925, Robinson received doctor’s permission to return to his job, as long as he worked only outdoors, for his health. The park was glad to have him back and assigned him to Brent, a small railway depot and village on Cedar Lake in the northeast of the park. His primary duty there was to watch for poachers. He twice returned to Cache Lake headquarters to serve as interim superintendent and then as superintendent before he retired in 1936.

  Hugh Trainor rented out the home in Huntsville for the thirteen years he and his family lived in Kearney. The weekly paper makes no mention of return visits, though surely there would have been some, at the very least to deal with tenants and the property. Life for Winnie in those years would have been much as described by her Kearney friend Wilfred Pocock. She had her small circle of friends. She attended church, played cards and worked hard at her job at Shortreed’s. She spent good-weather weekends and most holidays at Canoe Lake, where she remained a mysterious, almost silent figure. Increasingly, the other residents—both full-time and summer-only—began to think of her as eccentric and difficult, and largely avoided the cottages across from Little Wapomeo Island that belonged to the Trainors and the Blechers, who could be, they thought, equally eccentric and difficult.

  “Living next door to them Blechers is enough to make anybody odd,” longtime Canoe Lake resident Leonard “Gibby” Gibson told me during an interview back in the 1970s. “They used to fight like bulldogs,” Gibby said. “Martin [Jr.] did have a violent temper, and he liked to fight,” but added that Bessie was often a match for her brother when it came to temper tantrums. He recounted a long tale of Martin Blecher, Jr., marrying (for a second time) and planning to spend the winter at Canoe Lake with his new wife, Carolyn. Previously, Martin had lived mostly in the boathouse, leavi
ng the cottage to his mother, Louisa, and Bessie. (By this time Martin, Sr., had passed away.) Then, without warning, the newly married couple arrived with brand-new furniture for the cabin. Gibby helped haul it from the station to the Blechers’ place by boat. “By Geez,” he said, “about a week later, Martin came up and wanted us to go down and pick up the furniture. Bessie’d threw half of it in the lake. We went down and fished chesterfields and chairs out of the lake, hauled it back in the old boat and put it back in the storehouse. Two weeks later the warring was all over and everything was going smooth. Bessie went back down to Smoke Lake, where Martin and his wife were camping, and talked them into coming back down again. Next thing you know [the furniture] was back in the lake again. We hauled that stuff back and forth all summer and fall.”

  Martin Blecher, Jr., died at the cottage in March 1938. Canoe Lake resident Everet Farley met the undertaker near Highway 60 with his sleigh and horses, and the two of them returned to the Blechers’ cottage to collect the body. Farley claimed that when they were carrying the casket out, they stumbled, and the body fell out, and he never again set foot in the Blecher home.

  From that point on, the Blecher cottage, with its “NO TRESPASSING” sign and fence, became known on the lake as the “Ghost House.” And there was a story, often told, especially by the nearby campers around a fire, that a marble eye in the trophy head of a huge bull moose that Martin, Jr., had shot decades earlier (and that still hangs on the wall) fell to the floor one July 8th at midnight, the accepted anniversary of Tom Thomson’s disappearance.

  Martin Blecher, Jr., however, was far from the lake’s most famous ghost. Campers at Taylor Statten Camps were regaled with tales of Tom Thomson to the point where they romanticized his death and often made treks up to the cemetery, where they would place wildflowers on the old grave.